Get the latest movie theater news!

Cinema Treasures relaunches with new design, photo galleries, and more!

We are enormously excited to bring you the new Cinema Treasures website.

The new site features a brand new logo, revamped site design, upgraded theater browsing and searching (with Google maps, street views, and neighborhoods), photo galleries, and videos.

For starters, we’ve completely redesigned our theater guide. Browsing theaters has never been easier (or more fun). Our theater pages now have integrated Google maps, so for the first time you can see where theaters are located and whether they are open or closed. Open theaters have green map markers and closed theaters have red markers. Even better, you can quickly see how many theaters in a given area are renovating, restoring, demolished, etc.

Cinema Treasures has already become the world’s most comprehensive website dedicated to movie theaters with over 31,000 theaters from over 180 countries. With our new photo galleries, we also hope to build the world’s largest and most detailed theater photo archive.

Adding photos is easy and highly addictive. Find a theater, click on the photos tab, and then upload your images. Once you’ve begun adding photos to the site, you can share the link to all of your photos with friends. You can also “favorite” theaters and photos to bump up their rankings on Cinema Treasures.

We’ve also added Google street views for thousands of theaters, so even if we don’t have a current photo of a movie theater, you can see what it looks like. Even better, if the default street view isn’t pointing in the right direction, you can rotate the view until you find the best view of the theater and then save the changes.

With our new video section, you can also now find policy trailers, theater advertisements, documentaries, and other material from YouTube and Vimeo and upload new videos through the site.

Finally, Cinema Treasures has also created a new YouTube Channel, a dedicated Facebook page, and, most actively, a Twitter feed that is updated throughout the day with news about moviegoing and movie theaters. We’ve also redesigned and refocused our blog to provide more useful and current information about movie theaters, the exhibition industry, and the moviegoing experience.

We’re excited to bring all of this to you just in time for the summer movie season. So get out of the house, go to the movies, and take some photos while you’re there!

Next week, we’ll be taking some time to highlight all of the new features. But for now, enjoy kicking the tires! :)

CONGRATULATIONS, Patrick & Ross for the launch of the refurbished site with so many wonderful new features. Everybody reading this comment- please find your favorite theaters & “update” the photo that should be on the google street view by using the various arrows. Some street view photos are already there, but many need us to navigate down the virtual streets to find the theater.

The site looks very nice. Just trying to become familiar with the new navigation. Question: are members allowed to update or change personal information? If so, what tab is this under? The name that appears with my comments is not the same name that appeared on the old site. I’d like to change it back if I could. Thanks!

@Ron We fixed the buggy text on the homepage. You can already search for theaters by previous name with the current search tool. We’ll be adding support for searching by city next week.

@mrbillshow You can edit your profile information by clicking on your username in the red box on the upper right of your screen. Once on your profile, click ‘edit profile’ and then you can update your name, add an avatar, etc.

@Tinseltoes The design is largely finished, so that’s unlikely to change too much. That said, if you’re using an older browser, we recommend upgrading to the latest version of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, or Safari to get the best experience.

If you run into any new issues, please leave a comment here. You can also email us at .

Ron — Good point about subscribing to blog posts. We’ll look into it. :) You can view older comments by clicking the comments tab near the top of a theater page or by clicking view all comments at the beginning of the comments.

Thanks for all of your feedback and support, everyone. We’ll keep fine tuning in the weeks to come. By the way, your photos are amazing. We’ve already added 700!!!!

No, I want to be able to look back more than 100 theatres to see which ones have new comments. This should be easy to add to your site.

“View all 197 comments” doesn’t actually work, by the way. It doesn’t show all comments, just the most recent 25 commetns. To see earlier ones I still have to page back, 25 comments at a time. That’s probably not what you intended.

Liking the new look, though it will take some getting used to!
Really enjoying the photo uploads, really enriches the experience on here!
One thing though, can photo uploaders edit their photographs afterwards ? i.e change the description/licence as I’ve made errors in the uploads so far and cant seem to change them!

@thmaga We’re not quite ready to support editing uploaded photos, but that will come in the next week or two.

@RonNewman For now, once a street view has been changed by someone, it can’t be changed again. So, if you do see the update button on a streetview, you can be the one who sets the view for everyone else.

@RonNewman Comments are working as designed. Since some of our theaters have over 3000 comments, it’s a bit impractical to load them all into a single page, so that’s why we’ve added pagination.

As we all know there are many theatres with the same names such as Fox, State, Roxy, Tower and more. I always curious why there is not a way to search out a spicific name for example Tower, Los Angeles. insdead of going to a city like Los Angeles that has maybe 100 entries.

This is a huge upgrade, and I’m sure everyone is excited about uploading their photos, as I am. I would like to be able to go back and edit my comments, if necessary, and also, be able to know when anyone responds to a comment I may make. But if that’s not possible, it’s OK.

@RonNewman That’s correct. A better way to say it would be… you no longer have to make a comment to subscribe to the comments on a theater. You can subscribe or unsubscribe whenever you like — without leaving a comment.

@RonNewman That’s right, Ron. This is definitely a change from the old site. We got tons of complaints from people who kept getting notification emails about new comments. Many people never wanted these notifications or even thought they were spam… which caused us a lot of problems. So, now, you must subscribe to comments for a theater manually and you can easily see what your subscription status is.

The new site design will take some getting used to, but I think it looks and “feels” great. Only thing I miss, so far, is the list of theaters that I had previously commented on, which we were able to find in our old profile pages. I was going to use that list to go back and re-subscribe for various theater notifications. I almost wish I would have screen-captured the old list before the transition was made to the new site (my list went back almost 8 years and featured hundreds of theater pages), but that is a minor issue.

Looking forward to adding some of my personal photos to the various theater pages! Going to be a lot of fun. I just hope that we can all exercise some self-control and try not to add redundant shots that show the same views that others may have already posted before. I can see the galleries sort of running away with excessive and duplicate photos.

Also… since there is no longer a “preview” for new comments, can I assume that we are to use the same html commands as before to add links within our comments?

Anyway… thanks a bunch, guys. I think you’ve knocked this one out of the park!

@EdSolero Glad you like the new site. You shouldn’t need to resubscribe to comments. If you were subscribed to a theater before, you’re likely still subscribed now. But we are working on a way that will let you more easily see which theaters you follow. The comments have changed somewhat, so you’ll need to use a different type of code than before. We’ll have more detail about this later in the week.

Thanks, Patrick. Yes, I’m still subscribed to the theaters I was following before the switch. However, there are a great number of theaters that I used to follow going back to 2003 and all of those subscriptions were lost back in 2008-2009 due to a technical issue with the site that impacted comment notifications for all members. Unfortunately, that was during a time when I was pretty much inactive on CT and I had only recently started re-susbcribing to theater pages – within the last few months, actually. I had been using the historical list from the old member profile page to re-visit and re-subscribe to all of those other threads I had lost track of during my inactivity. No big deal. I’ll eventually find my way back around to the theaters that matter most to me. In fact, I’m sure it’ll be more fun re-discovering many of those lost theater comment threads by navigating around the new database!

Looking forward to details on the new code for embedding links in comments. Thanks again!

@RonNewman Street views are added automatically. To add a street view, we need a good address, map coordinates, and Google must have a street view available for those coordinates. If all of these conditions are right, we’re then able to show the street view.

Thanks. And finally, how do I fix incorrect maps? I’ve tried to pick up the red pushpin and move it, but that doesn’t work. A number of Boston theatres are on the wrong streets, because the city has multiple streets with the same name in different neighborhoods.

The old site displayed comments with our “display name”. The new site always uses our username, along with a display name if we provide one. It would be nice to go back to only the the display name. When I registered at the old site, I believe it indicated that my username would not be public.

Site looks great, as I posted somewhere else in I thought this thread (although can’t seem to find that post!).
Anyway, I think the street view thing is GREAT, and have been having a lot of fun fixing a lot of them (oddly, most don’t come up to the right spot or even the right street!)
Anyway, how do we change street views of theaters were someone might have accidentally pressed the “update street view” button, but did it in the wrong spot? For example, the RKO Bushwick Theater. It comes up to the back of the theater building, but someone must have inadvertantly pressed “update street view” for this view, but it really should show the front of the building, not the bricks of the back on a side street….
Most have been set correctly, this is one of the few that was clicked on a street view that is wrong. When you click on “street view” you will see what I mean by it being “wrong”. I added acurrent photo of the theater building just so it wouldn’t automatically come up with the incorrect street view image!:

Here’s the link to the Bushwick Theater:
http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/1322

Here’s the link to what the street view SHOULD look like, but it can’t be changed, at least not by regular users once it’s set to the wrong view. Is there any way to “reset” the theater so someone can reposition it correctly, or put this correct link in?:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=1396+Broadway,+Brooklyn,+NY+11221&aq=&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=50.69072,89.560547&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=1396+Broadway,+Brooklyn,+Kings,+New+York+11221&ll=40.688823,-73.921165&spn=0.011959,0.021865&t=h&z=16&layer=c&cbll=40.688806,-73.92123&panoid=rGmQghL0OFUk7Gx1SjaEfQ&cbp=12,134.98,,0,-12.37

Ron, that may be the browser you use. it displays fine with Firefox. I wonder why you see it differently?

Anyway, I had another question. As new photos are added to the site, what photo becomes the default? Are they rotated, or does the newest or oldest become the “default”.
I can see advantages or disadvantages to it being the first or the newest, but perhaps it would be even better if it “rotated” between whatever photos are loaded for a particular theater. That way, any theater isn’t defaulted with perhaps a “bad” photo being the defaulted photo for eternity……

@Bway We’ve reset the street view for the Bushwick Theater. Can you update it for us now?

There’s no way to preview a comment before posting it. We’ll probably add that back in a few weeks.

In terms of default photos, for now, we select the most popular photograph for a theater. Eventually, as we get more photos, we’ll probably limit that to the most popular landscape photo… and we’ll also reserve the right to pick what we think is the best photo for a theater (which will override the most popular photo).

While talking about all the great things the site is now (and I love the changes), one other thing on the negative side is the fact that links are no longer a different color than the actual text of posts, so when people post links in their comments, they are quite hard to find now, as they don’t show up as a different color. Just a thought.

All of that information is still accessible. Just go to the main theater page (http://cinematreasures.org/theaters) and click the links for “architects,” “chains,” etc. The links are a little light — we should hopefully be enhancing the colors on site links soon.

Great update on the website – so many new features to check out! Photos, street views!

Great to see all the suggestions and how fast they’re being acted on! Thought I’d add my suggestions as well:

Search by city: This was a VERY important feature by me as I’d often be checking out a lot of theatres in a particular city. The search box on the main page only goes by name or zipcode (I rarely know the zipcode but usually know the city) and often I want to canvas a bunch from a specific city.

The new “movie theatres” search box at the top of the “theatres” page is workable but I have to click multiple times (country, then state, then city, sometimes even neighborhood) and is srickly with two-word names (New York) if you don’t know the syntax (“new-york”) Also, it is easy to miss the capabilities of this search box (it wasn’t clear upon first glance that I could search right down to neighborhood level). Also, this search box probably should also appear on the main page, as the “search for” feature there only allows search by name and zipcode.

Perhaps we could add a separate search page where people could search on one or more fields (city, state, screens, current use, name, # seats, etc.)

It was very helpful to be able to search by current name AND/OR former name, OR both. Often I would only be searching for a former name, sometimes I wanted both current and former.

a. Browse Lists: Could these be expanded to show perhaps 100 theatres (currently only ddisplays 30) That would help when say browsing by architecural style (i.e. returns 89 pages for “streamline moderne”). Also, could the little navigation box at the bottom have an input box added where a user can jump to a specific page? Right now we can only click on the first ten pages or the last two; it’s extremely tedious to navigate to the middle of a major list – you can only jump 4 pages at a time. BTW, I DO like the fact that the entire list can be sorted by name, city, status, etc!

b. These browse lists show only “open” or “closed” under “status”. Could the detailed status be put there instead (i.e. restoring, demolished, showing movies etc.? I do like the tabs above that allow us to break out the list by detailed status, but it’d be nice ti also have that lebvel of detail in the main list. Also, could the browse lists also display # seats and maybe year built?

Updates page: Could the “submit a theatre” feature have the ability to record changes to an existing theatre’s info? Sometimes I would be checking a lot of theatres and compile a list of 20-25 that I have updated info for. I would use the “contact us” feature to send in changes/additional info, but it would be a long list that would have to be manually edited into the database. This might make it easier at both ends (but still reviewed by CT).

—-some more trivial suggestions—

Additional fields: Could years built/renovated/demolished be added to the individual theatre pages? I know we’d enter that when submitting new theatres.

Architectural styles: could “modern” be added as a choice? Right now the closest choice is “streamline moderne” which is VERY different from outright Modern (i.e. few built after the mid 1950s could be considered Streamline). Also, I miss the “art moderne” designation as I felt that was fairly distinct from “streamline”.

“submit a theatre” That link should probably have a more prominent location, and not just say “submit your favorite…” We want people to submit ANY new theatres they know about, not just their favorite!

The Challenge of New York City: The boroughs of Bronx and Brooklyn as their own “cities”, with additional neighborhood designations (makes it easy to browse those boroughs) but theatres for Queens and Staten Island are split into their individual neighborhoods (i.e. Flushing, Astoria, etc. as the “city” field) Is it possible to have them grouped together by their borough name the way it’s done for Brooklyn and Bronx? (It’s only about 60-70 theatres IIRL.)

Adjusting street view – I understand that once someone updates a street view, only that person can do further updates for that theatre. Could one release themselves from that obgligation and allow someone else to do it? I’m not sure I’d want to be responsible for future updates (of course once a street view is updated it shouldn’t need changing anyway unless the Empire 25 building gets moved down the street again :–)

I agree with CT staff having the say on which photo ios the definitive one for the theatre page, but would itbe possible to make a suggestion if one sees a (possibly recently posted) photo that is clearly better in terms of brightness, color quality, sharpness, etc.?

Any way to widen the width of the “comments” section slightly (would require narrowing the right hand links/ads column)

OVERALL: These issues pale in comparison to the enormous improvements you’ve made to an already fantastic website so I’m certainly not complaining! This has been an amazing resource, but is so much better now!

I got past the first page, but now I’m on the second. I filled in ‘Retail’ under ‘Functions’, and pressed ‘Add’, and that cleared the form field I had just filled in. Now I press the ‘Finish Theater and Save’ button, and it does nothing at all. No new page, no waiting for a new page, just nothing.

Here’s the URL for the page I’m now on: http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/35976/finish?name=Retail&commit=Add

Also, even though it successfully created a new theatre page at http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/35976/ , the page is not listed at http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/newest , nor at http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/united-states/ohio/columbus , nor at http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/united-states/ohio/columbus/near-southside .

I added a comment to http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/35976 with URLs of some oral histories that mention the Champion Theatre. The URLs did not turn into live links, and the comment is unreadable because the right margin of the column cuts it off.

Let me just add, that the new search feature BLOWS away the old one. I LOVE the fact that when you are searching for a theater (often by it’s most known name, not necessarily it’s current name), the theater comes up anyway! That saves an extra step, and also makes it so much easier to find theaters! Great!
I do agree with someone’s suggestion above that the default amount of finds on a page be raised from 30, it does make it hard to browse when a very common theater name is searched. The only thing I liked about the old search vs the new one was the fact that you could click “view all”, as you could quickly scan the whole list, as opposed to page after page of results. Again, ESPECIALLY when it’s a common name.

As I just mentioned in my response to Ron, it will be a while before we can add support for ‘view all’ again… but we’re working on a ton of other improvements to the new search which should make the absence of ‘view all’ last painful.

@spectrum You just won The Longest Feedback Comment Ever Award. Congratulations! ;)

But, seriously, thanks for the awesome feedback. I’ll try to respond to everything you asked about below.

We’re working on adding search by city. That should be available in the next week or so.

We’re also working on several other improvements to the new search which address some of the issues you raised.

Theater list page size: we’re sticking with 30 theaters per page for now, but we let you customize that in the future.

Theater list status: also sticking with just open/closed for now, but agreed it would be cool to show other information too. Probably unlikely to show seats and year built. It’s too much information for most people.

Updates page: we’re working on a way for you to quickly edit basic theater information like address, contact info, etc. Probably a few weeks away.

Additional fields: we can’t add the dates for when a theater was built, renovated, etc. right now… but we have something in mind for that.

Architectural styles: that’s a good question for Ross and Ken. So please email with that one.

More prominent link for “submit a theater”: agreed. We’re working on it!

The Challenge of New York City: and, indeed, it is a challenge. We can’t do that now. Maybe in the future.

Adjusting street view: if you find a botched street view, just email and we’ll reset it for you. Eventually, we’ll upgrade how street view saving works. This is just a start. :)

Default theater photo suggestions: we love suggestions. Just email them to and we’ll take a look.

Hahaha, the “Challenge of NYC” is actually a post office “problem” or phenomena, not a site problem. The post office lumps all of Brooklyn, Manhattan, Bronx into borough, and has Queens broken by town/zip code. For example, you will never see “Bushwick, NY 11223” on an envelope, you will always see “Brooklyn, NY 11223”. That, as opposed to nearby Ridgewood, which is in Queens will be the opposite, “Ridgewood, NY 11385” as opposed to “Queens, NY 11385”. Don’t know why the post office divides Queens up by town/zip code, but not the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx, but it’s the way it’s done. Similarly, you will never see “Greenwich Village, NY 10XXX”, it will be “New York, NY 100XX”…. Just the way the post office and mapping does it.

I am a bit confused on theater page’s comments. Sometimes it seems to be newest message on top, and other times it seems to be newest message on bottom. I don’t think it was like that the other day, but it is getting a bit confusing, I dont know if it’s intentional or a glitch. For example, I was reading the RKO Keith’s page in Flushing, and it seems like the newest messages are on bottom, but it randomly picks some spot for an old message on top. The other day, I think the newest messages were on the top. Furthermore, when you click “View all messages”, it seems to reverse, newest messages on top.
It is a bit confusing. I think it would be a matter of getting used to for new messages on top, as the old site had them on bottom, but I can see why that would be done in the new format. I think it causes mass confusion when it’s not consistent though….sometimes on top, sometimes on bottom depending on if you are viewing all the messages or new messages. Just a thought.

Then there’s the Challenge of Boston, where the same street name is used for multiple different streets in different neighborhoods. Bowdoin Street, Cambridge Street, and especially Washington Street. I hope to soon be able to help CinemaTreasures fix the many theatres that got assigned to the wrong street with the right name.

You guys probably have your hands full tackling bugs and tweaking features based on suggestion comments from members – not to mention sifting through all the suggestions – but here are one or two more for you:

Was wondering if we could have the option to re-sort comments either from oldest to newest or vice versa. And regardless of the view (all comments, overview) would it be possible to have the “New Comment” box available (right now it is only on the “overview” screen).

I, for one, also liked how opening a link on the old site would launch a new browser window. This was particularly helpful when the link opened to a series of photos to scroll through. The old way, once we’re done scrolling through the images, we’d just close the browser window and still have the CT browser window open where we left off. With the new site, clicking on a link opens the new link in the same window as the current CT page. If we were to scroll through a series of new photos with the link, we would then need to scroll back through all of the photos again to return to the CT page we had jumped from. This can be quite annoying.

Finally, it seems that folks may have accidently clicked on the “update Street View” button on several theater pages without having selected a proper view of the building. Is there a way to request that the street view be reset in these instances rather than just leaving a comment in the thread that the view has to be fixed?

I think that’s it, for now. Again… having fun going through the new database and look forward to finding some time to get acquainted with the Add-a-Photo feature!

I have to agree with both of Ed’s suggestions. It would be GREAT to be able to have an option to view comments either as “new on top”, or “new on bottom”. I know a lot of people like the new comments on bottom, but I for one liked how the new site was originally set up, with the new comments on top, as opposed to the old site’s way of new comments on bottom. I for one found it easier to view the newest comments when they showed up on top. Of course, I guess that’s personal preference.

Hey Guys,just relearning the new site I was wondering why some of us have lost our “Screen Names” I was listed as TLSLOEWS,now it shows my name no big deal,but since the relaunch I still get e-mail notifications but cannot see the theatre pages.They say my computer needs upgrading,most likely true,I have to use my wifes new one to see or leave comments.

Bway: Queens is broken down by the post office in that manner because the post office designations predate Queens' incorporation as a borough of New York: most of those neighborhoods were separate villages with their own postmaster prior to becoming part of NYC, while Brooklyn and New York (Manhattan) were already unified cities onto themselves with one postmaster each.

Also, is there a way that any of the website creators can go in and fix the Box Office Section of the CT website? I know I’ve been unable to get into that section since coming back on here. Again, just curious.